It’s no secret that vim is an extremely powerful text editor. It is almost infinitely configurable, but that comes at the cost of a very steep learning curve. Vim (and of course Emacs as well) can allow you to manipulate text in almost magical ways, but the question is “is it worth the time and effort to learn it?”

I have attempted to pick up vim several times in my life, but only in the last year has it stuck. Two resources got me over the hump of learning vim: Derek Wyatt’s vim tutorial videos and Carlhuda’s Janus.

Janus is a configuration for vim that makes taking the leap into vim much easier. It includes several plugins that provide functionality you may be used to from editors like TextMate, including a project drawer, snippets, and Command-T style file search.

If you are curious about vim, take a look at these two resources. Yehuda Katz also wrote an excellent post on easing your way into vim.

Well if you want to pretend to be a programmer use something simple, when you realize it’s a 10+ year commitment it’s worth a few weeks learning a real IDE like EMACS. I rebind caps lock on any OS I use and rock EMACS, anything less is just wasting my time. Nobody else provides a full JavaScript interpreter in their IDE.

Emacs is awesome without a doubt. It never clicked for me, but I can’t deny that it’s a powerful tool, which is why I gave it a nod in the article. It’s hard to write about vim/emacs without starting an argument about which is better.

Me too! I tried Vim at least 2 times before completely switching to Vim because of Janus.
Now i don’t use Janus anymore but my own Vim setup with some configurations that i took from Janus.
Also Pathogen really helps for managing vim plugins! Check that out: https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen

I have forked Janus to basically act as my .vim. Instead of using the .local files, I just modify the rakefile and .vim files, which makes it super quick to clone and setup my.vim on a new machine. The Rakefile is a really awesome way to manage plugins, and has been a better experience for me than just Pathogen. I just add a line to the rake file and rake!